Harrogate Crime and Dina's chain letter...

I'm very excited because I'm doing an event on Friday, and I haven't done anything like this in a while. I do enjoy them. Which came as a surprise to me.

Heads up, then, I'm at the Harrogate Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival. A bit of a mouthful but it promises to be a corker. There's a party Thursday night, where I get to meet all the other writers and remember their names to drop when I come back :) Then I do my thing Friday at midday. The event's called New Blood, and I'll be sharing the stage with several other debut writers. To paraphrase, well, more accurately cut and paste from the brochure:

A quartet of exceptionally talented authors will introduce you to their very different first novels. Nick Stone’s Mr Clarinet is a noir tour-de-force set in Haiti, Tom Cain’s The Accident Man features action hero Daniel Carver, Caro Ramsay’s atmospheric and emotionally intelligent thriller, Absolution, is set in Glasgow, and Nicola Monaghan won a Betty Trask award for her darkly moving, twisty debut, The Killing Jar. Joanna Hines, novelist and paperback crime reviewer for the Guardian, chairs.

Joanna Hines in fact is the person responsible for the lovely review I had in the Guardian a few months ago so A It will be nice to know she genuinely did like my book and B I will be able to thank her in person, which I'm looking forward to.

Well, if you fancy a jolly out to North Yorkshire you know where I'll be. Full details and tickets available here.

Meanwhile this wonderful blogger has taken up the baton with Dina's book. Yay!

Nicola

Dina Rabinovitch

I've become involved in a piece of blogging chain mail. I don't usually do chain mail, but this one is different. Your head won't fall off if you don't join in and you won't get lots of gold and chocolate or your biggest wish come true within 7 hours if you do. But it might just pass an important message on.

The point is breast cancer, and Dina Rabinovitch, a long term sufferer of the disease. Long term sufferer is an important idea, because such a thing, with breast cancer, did not exist until recently. Advances in treatment and drugs have changed this. Dina lives on the cutting edge of cancer treatment. She blogs about it here.

Dina's book is beautifully written and full of information. It made me cry, it made me realise how lucky I was and it made me check for lumps again. Thanks Dina.

I now need someone to continue the chain. The deal is, I send you the book, you blog it and ask for someone to send it on to, and continue the chain. Each blogger writes their details in the front. The first person to comment on this post asking for the book will get it. You can blame this minx for starting the chain. Thank you Minx.

Pass it on....